He was wisdom personified, his manner so serious and formal that Tally found herself wishing she had dressed up.

Scott Westerfeld -- Uglies

For us Ultima personified goodness, and any risk in defense of goodness was right.

Rudolfo Anaya -- Bless Me, Ultima

He’s goodness personified.

Anne Frank -- The Diary of a Young Girl

Look at Aramis, now; Aramis is mildness and grace personified.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

The two of us personified the mix of arts and technology; right brain/left brain, drama guy/computer guy.

Randy Pausch -- The Last Lecture

Perhaps it was the fascination of seeing that particular force so explicitly personified in a human body.

Ayn Rand -- The Fountainhead

Anne sat up, tragedy personified.

Lucy Maud Montgomery -- Anne Of Green Gables

Phileas Fogg was, indeed, exactitude personified, and this was betrayed even in the expression of his very hands and feet; for in men, as well as in animals, the limbs themselves are expressive of the passions.

Jules Verne -- Around the World in 80 Days

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He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority.

Michael Crichton -- Jurassic Park

The lady was also in green, and so richly and splendidly dressed that splendour itself seemed personified in her.

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

As the envoy of the prefect of police arrived ten minutes before ten, he was told that Lord Wilmore, who was precision and punctuality personified, was not yet come in, but that he would be sure to return as the clock struck.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified.

Joseph Conrad -- Heart of Darkness

Without putting the thing clearly to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

I did not know whether to resent this language or pursue my explanation; but he seemed so powerfully affected that I took pity and proceeded with my dreams; affirming I had never heard the appellation of ’Catherine Linton’ before, but reading it often over produced an impression which personified itself when I had no longer my imagination under control.

Emily Bronte -- Wuthering Heights

Here I was, a loner to the core, burnout personified, with a train wreck of a home life.

Sarah Dessen -- Lock and Key

I thought that for Deo the begging woman personified the problems of his country, and his fears for it.

Tracy Kidder -- Strength in What Remains

Then the four women who personified the elements moved as one to the table.

P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast -- Marked

Now, and by the few words at the door, he had become the thing personified.

Sherwood Anderson -- Winesburg, Ohio

In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event on board the Indomitable, and in the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places.

Herman Melville -- Billy Budd

The conventional farm-folk of his imagination— personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few days’ residence.

Thomas Hardy -- Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form.

Thomas Hardy -- Far from the Madding Crowd

Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity.

Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary

If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

Milan Kundera -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being

He personified the Institute’s capacity for deviance.

Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline

The most unhappy aspect of their relations was Dick’s growing indifference, at present personified by too much drink; Nicole did not know whether she was to be crushed or spared—Dick’s voice, throbbing with insincerity, confused the issue; she couldn’t guess how he was going to behave next upon the tortuously slow unrolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at the moment of the leap.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night

The female principle was personified in the beautiful girl whom Raven encountered in the great room within the animal; meanwhile the conjunction of male and female was symbolized separately in the flow of the oil from the pipe into the burning lamp.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical, squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins, so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel.

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

Peeperkorn was courtesy personified, by the way.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

She was simply knowledge embodied, embalmed, and personified.

Abraham Verghese -- Cutting for Stone

It was he who, from the beginning of the tragedy to its end, personified Society for the Turners.

Doris Lessing -- The Grass is Singing

These were followed by the Moralities, plays in which were personified abstract virtues and vices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays

Consequently, I’m also in training to be a High Priestess of Nyx, the vampyre Goddess, who is Night personified.

P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast -- Betrayed

Representative Fisher Ames of ’Massachusetts later wrote of sitting "entranced," as though he were witnessing "an allegory on which virtue was personified."

David McCullough -- John Adams

I have frequently used the word "equality" in an absolute sense—nay, I have personified equality in several places; thus I have said that equality does such and such things, or refrains from doing others.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 2

In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.

Albert Camus -- The Plague

In Trueba’s opinion, the time had arrived for him to come out in defense of the national interest and of the Conservative Party, since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared, adding that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and not only that, had created jobs and a decent life for all his workers and owned the only hacienda with little brick houses.

Isabel Allende -- The House of Spirits

…starting with Herzen, its assassinations of Tsars, some only plotted, others carried out, the whole of the workers’ movement of the world, the whole of Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, the whole of this new system of ideas with its newness, the swiftness of its conclusion, its irony, and its pitiless remedies elaborated in the name of pity-all of this was absorbed and expressed in Lenin, who fell upon the old world as the personified retribution for its misdeeds.

BOOK XXV Proud Music of the Storm 1 Proud music of the storm, Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies, Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains, Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras, You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert, Blending with Nature’s rhythmus all the tongues of nations; You chords left as by vast composers—you choruses, You formless, free, religious dances—you from the Orient, You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring…

Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass

He had just viewed the malice of men and the misery of society under a new aspect— incomplete aspects, which unfortunately only exhibited one side of the truth, the fate of woman as summed up in Fantine, and public authority as personified in Javert.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Your own conscience, conveniently personified in the body of another person and attending to your concern for the less fortunate of this world, thus leaving you free not to attend to.

Ayn Rand -- The Fountainhead

My dear Aramis, you speak like theology personified.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

She looked like someone had turned on a blazing inner light within her, which I realize is definitely an ironic description considering the vampyre stereotypes (some of which I already knew were totally true): They avoid sunlight, they’re most powerful at night, they need to drink blood to survive (eesh!), and they worship a goddess who is known as Night personified.

P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast -- Marked

In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

She personified the figure of death and made him now a strong black-haired youth running over hills, now a stem quiet man marked and scarred by the business of living.

Sherwood Anderson -- Winesburg, Ohio

Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

"The incident illustrates to perfection," wrote Ellsworth Toohey, "the antisocial nature of Mr. Howard Roark’s egotism, the arrogance of the unbridled individualism which he has always personified."

Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.

George Eliot -- Middlemarch

He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir!

Ralph Ellison -- Invisible Man

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And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.

Milan Kundera -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being

As for me, I fell somewhere between my sisters and their strong personalities, the very personification of the vast gray area that separated them.

Sarah Dessen -- Just Listen

The latter, rigid, erect and defiant, with one hand still upon her daughter’s arm, seemed the very personification of unbending pride.

Baroness Orczy -- The Scarlet Pimpernel

Possibly the fellow claims to levitate, or personifies a dead Indian, or produces spirit rappings, like the celebrated Fox sisters.

Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace

Nay, more, to render their mode of speech more succinct, they personify the subject of these abstract terms, and make it act like a real entity.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 2

I should say, ’My esteemed Boythorn’—to make you the personification of our imaginary friend—’my esteemed Boythorn, you object to the mighty potentate?

Charles Dickens -- Bleak House

You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers.

Jules Verne -- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Oh, he is the exact personification of what I have been led to expect!

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

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Then the Goddess Nyx, the ancient personification of Night, leaned forward and kissed me on my forehead.

P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast -- Marked

Count Ilya Rostov with the other members of the committee sat facing Bagration and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality, did the honors to the prince.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

With his gentle demeanor, Gandhi seemed the very personification of nonviolence, and he insisted that the campaign be run along identical lines to that of his father’s in India.

Nelson Mandela -- Long Walk to Freedom

Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by his commonplace but ambitions followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of equality.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

Next follows the killing of the ’Bull of Heaven’, a monster that personifies the seven years’ drought which was sent by the angry goddess in punishment for her rejection by Gilgamesh.

Unknown -- The Epic of Gilgamesh

As daughters of Mnemosyne, "memory," the Muses personify oral tradition, and Greek song traditions about Troy constitute the third and most immediate context in which to locate The Iliad.

Homer -- The Iliad

WITH THE PERSONIFICATIONS of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the "threshold guardian" at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope, are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose.

William Wordsworth -- Preface to Lyrical Ballads

I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language.

William Wordsworth -- Preface to Lyrical Ballads

In many ways, Luke personifies the dramatic shift in the U.S. industrial labor market.

Adam Davidson -- Making It in America

Yes, the personification of shiftlessness.

W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk

And by the spells which ye vouchsafe to those your ministers in earnest, I here personify and call my themes, to make them pass before ye.

Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass

While the other awards are given to a student who exhibits one particular quality, the Founders’ Stone is awarded to that rare student who personifies many.

Henry H. Neff -- The Hound of Rowan

Had there been painters in those days capable to execute such a subject, the Jew, as he bent his withered form, and expanded his chilled and trembling hands over the fire, would have formed no bad emblematical personification of the Winter season.

Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe

The vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

But he had not moved; his massive figure looked the very personification of unbending pride, of fierce obstinacy.

Baroness Orczy -- The Scarlet Pimpernel

Political parties in the United States are led to rally round an individual, in order to acquire a more tangible shape in the eyes of the crowd, and the name of the candidate for the Presidency is put forward as the symbol and personification of their theories.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 1

She was a direct embodiment and personification of the New Testament,—a living fact, to be accounted for, and to be accounted for in no other way than by its truth.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The poet will not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings in whom his readers and his own fancy have ceased to believe; nor will he present virtues and vices in the mask of frigid personification, which are better received under their own features.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 2

I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

Oscar Wilde -- The Importance of Being Earnest

To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society.

David McCullough -- John Adams

— … But these demons can hardly be distinguished from the diseases they personify — — — and many of the diseases sound, to modern ears, as though they must be psychosomatic.’

Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash

I hope you will agree that in these two instances I have cited from his career - both of which I have had corroborated and believe to be accurate - my father not only manifests, but comes close to being the personification itself, of what the Hayes Society terms ’dignity in keeping with his position’.

Kazuo Ishiguro -- The Remains of the Day

"I" is here introduced to personify the world in general—the Mrs. Grundy of each respected reader’s private circle—every one of whom can point to some families of his acquaintance who live nobody knows how.

William Makepeace Thackeray -- Vanity Fair

Ever since my adolescent mind began to comprehend the complexities of our daily life, I looked upon a human being as a personification of that great unknown with a very specific mission on earth to fulfill.

Jay Allison, et al. -- This I Believe

He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvana.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity.

Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged

He symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond the camp-fire.

Jack London -- White Fang

By some nations the monarch has been regarded as a personification of the country; and the fervor of patriotism being converted into the fervor of loyalty, they took a sympathetic pride in his conquests, and gloried in his power.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 1

Oskar Schindler personifies that definition.

Leon Leyson -- The Boy on the Wooden Box

The eight of clubs, for instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

It contained a brilliant account of the festivities and of the beautiful and accomplished Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s admirable personifications.

William Makepeace Thackeray -- Vanity Fair

So we personify it …. but we don’t tell you what it is.

Robert A. Heinlein -- Tunnel In the Sky

The personification of law, order, and justice.

Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays

It was human—the personification of pain and terror—the tremendous struggle of precious life against horrible death.

Zane Grey -- The Man of the Forest

It was right to personify nations.

T. H. White -- The Once and Future King

And as I moved toward the center of the circle I felt like I was literally personifying the emotion.

P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast -- Betrayed

WHEN THE HERO-QUEST has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

The prince beholds, dumbfounded, not only hisfriend transformed into the living personification of the Support of the Universe, but the heroes of the two armies rushing on a wind into the deity’s innumerable, terrible mouths.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

The two gigantic negroes that now laid hold of Tom, with fiendish exultation in their faces, might have formed no unapt personification of powers of darkness.